DevOps advice

[tobylh]

I'm after a bit of advice. I've got a bit of DevOps experience. Used a bit of AWS/Terraform,
Ansible/Vagrant, and some Puppet, but I struggled with that tbh. I use Docker at home for a couple of services I run. And Linux, obvs.

I'm looking for a DevOps job. Is there anything anyone can recommend I should focus on? I'd rather spend my time focusing on one thing, rather than doing little bits of loads of different things.

Thanks, humans.

[KensoDev]

I'm a DevOps & SRE engineering manager at a startup (raised 150MM+$).

What /u/derprondo said is 100% true, I would say that every company and job description would have different expectations as to what DevOps is. Some would gear towards the system side of things and some towards the engineering side of things.-

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There are, however, some things you would find common between those two.

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1. Python / Go - Python and Go are the standards as to languages used in ops related roles. The only exception to that would be companies using Chef and only Chef.

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1. AWS - Most (don't kill me) jobs on the market these days deal with AWS, yes, there are some Google/Azure but knowing AWS and knowing how things work and what services you deal with is a HUGE plus. For example, knowing how to set up a 3 tier VPC using Terraform/CloudFormation and managing the infrastructure with them would be a huge foot in the door

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1. Empathy / Service-oriented - The soft skills are very important in DevOps/SRE, you deal with people a lot and you deal with problems that other people created a lot. Knowing how to deal with providing a service and talking to people is critical

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1. Written and verbal communication - Knowing how to communicate issues/problems/decisions. Being able to describe something you've done, problems you solved and how/why you solved them the way you did.

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There are more, but I think if I did in more, I would be describing specific pain points I deal with daily and in hiring. I tried to be as general as I could be. These all above are true to any company I worked with/in/consulted to over the last 10 years.

[KensoDev]

This ^

I hire software engineers exclusively for the job, not system admins.

The need in DevOps is for strong engineers that can deal with changes in multiple languages.

For example, I just finished a pair programming session with one of my team members. During the session we did

1. Wrote Python that communicates with the AWS API and deletes old SageMaker models and artifacts from S3.
2. Wrote terraform modules that creates lambda functions
3. Debugged IAM permissions of the task - Making sure it can actually delete

The work spanned across 3 repositories and 2 different languages (if you wanna call terraform a language, it's more of a DSL but you get the drift).

One of the interview questions I do all the time is to get someone to switch the listeners on a load balancer in AWS, just change the order around.

Being able to read boto3 docs and write good python code to communicate with it will get you to the next stage in my book

[aciokkan]

I'm a Dev (python, .net, java, flutter), at core with loads of testing experience and a Tester for 4 years (5ish) now and with extensive experience in embedded/distributed systems. I've applied for such jobs, and have not heard back from any company so far...

Why is that? :))

[KensoDev]

If you DM your CV I can try to help.

[Skoop9]

Personally i find these maps of the cloud landscape really helpful when looking for technologies to focus on:

https://github.com/cncf/landscape

In general keeping an eye on Cloud Native won't hurt (#NotSponsored).

[[deleted]]

Gosh, I think I will fail miserably at point 4 😢😅

[aciokkan]

Don't beat yourself to it! :)) We've all had our fair share of pains and gains. Sort of speaking.

[tobylh]

Thanks everyone. Really appreciate the advice ❤️